Judge: "Mr. Gates, as a spokesman and an influential leader of Microsoft Corporation, do you promise not to use Microsoft's current monopoly in an abusive manner?"
Gates: "Well..." [Bill, staring at the floor, kicks a tile with the tip of his shoe. He glances at Balmer.]
Judge: "Billll???" [Peering down to catch youthful William's eye.] "Come one now, you can do it. Steven's already promised."
Gates: "OK, I -- I promise."
Judge: "See, that wasn't so bad. Was it?" [Most in the court room look around, shaken by the emotion, almost to the point of crying. Some indeed do wipe back tears as they nod in approval.]
Doj: "Oh, darn it! Everybody, group hug!" [And a cheer goes up as Justice has once agin been served. Golly, it sure as heck has.]
Lindows aside, I don't think we have to worry about this. You could literally just pop in the installation disks for most (non-MS) 16-bit windows software and install it and run it under OS/2. Wine is considerably more, err, byzantine.
OS/2's Windows support was hokey. By the time Windows programs were really taking off, they were for Win32s (Win95-style, not Win3x). Those programs worked poorly at best under OS/2 if they worked at all. Good Win32s support was always promised just around the corner, and it never came.
Many of those same programs now work -- and install -- under Wine with much better sucess.
And plus it doesn't work very reliably for the software (well, Word, IE and Outlook) that most people want to use, and it seems like the developers are more interested in using the code for proprietary emulation for running specific programs (games, plugins) or porting (corel stuff, etc.) than producing a general, Free, universal windows emulator.
Wine is not emulation. Here's what the FAQ-o-Matic says;
WINE stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It implements native code to the function calls present in the Windows DLL's. An emulator is something that duplicates the environment that an application runs in. WINE doesn't bother.
As for your other points, no current versions of Word, IE, or Outlook work under OS/2, yet old versions do work under Wine and current versions should be there shortly; remember Lindows MS Office support is based on Wine. Track the progress on the Wine mailing lists and on appdb.codeweavers.com. Some non-Lindows Wine screen shots are available here; wine.godmonkey.com.
While SuperRescue is fantastic, it does not elimiate boot diskettes becuase quite a few machines can't boot a CD (disabled), and when the CD drive breaks, you've got to have a fall back.
The downside to this, other than potentially having to track down every author is that you'd have to give the author a reason for wanting the license. That would probably compromise the security of the project, at least potentially. Even saying "the use will be classified" is probably too much information in some instances.
Govmnt guy: "We need to have a private copy of your software. Can we buy it?"
Me: "Hmmm...OK." (Govmnt gives money, Me gives Govmnt new licence.)
Me: "Do I have to claim this on my taxes?
Govmnt guy: "Yessss."
Me: "By the way, what are you going to do with your new software, anyway?"
Govmnt guy: "It's classified."
Me: "Oh, really?" (Govmnt guy hands over more money.)
Any change in available memory can have a drastic effect. The sum total of the changes should add up to a minimum of 10M on an untuned system (One example: Bonobo on Gnome uses ~3.5MB by itself, while a few Gnome terms with a large history buffer chew up an additonal 10MB -- not all of it shared. Just switching from a heavy weight WM to a light weight one and smaller helper apps would recover the bulk of this space. Other changes would only add to the savings).
That minimum of 10MB might be just enough to cut disk swapping down -- by how much it really depends on the application. If it's a single block of data, and no calculations are being done, no speed improvement will be noticed. If it's an in-memory array, the savings could be substantial.
Without giving it a try, or knowing the application's demands, nobody can say for certian.
I'll second the other comments already made. In addition, sometimes the simplest ideas are the most valuable, though I'll assume you can't just drop in more RAM.
With that as a given, if your app needs all available memory, run top and lsmod to see what's using your memory and remove everything you don't need (usually by deleting the links to those processes in the/etc/???/rc5.d directory).
If you can't remove it, scale it down. For example/etc/inittab lists off the different virtual terminals that appear when you press ctrl-alt and a function key. If you never use this feature, try reducing this down to 1 or 2 terminals. Leave some behind just in case you need them later. To do this, just comment the higher numbered lines that look like this;
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6
(NOTE: Removing these lines might not make any difference -- it all depends on the distribution.)
As for X (assuming you need it and are using XFree), try removing any Load lines in the modules section that you don't need and scaling down the display size, background images, and color depth. Another big area of savings is changing the window manager. FVWM usually is installed, and while it is ugly it is also fairly light weight when compaired to KDE, Gnome, and other popular full-featured WMS.
While these steps alone won't eliminate the speed problems -- the other comments might solve that -- the time you spend waiting might be cut way down.
Unix-systems are similar enough that a switch from one to another is usually practical. Everything else is preference or application specific.
I agree that mind share is a big deal, and often trumps technical capability. The Hurd, though, is an interesting beast. It has some potential applications where Linux isn't as useful (currently). Like the BSD Jail, Linux will either add those capabilities or will not be as useful. Unlike Jail, some of the capabilities of Hurd come from the design of Hurd, so mimicing them under Linux will likely be awkward or impractical.
Either way, it should spur more evolution in modern Unix-style systems, so it's worth it for that reason alone.
After talking to a couple people today, it seems like the impression that many non-Mozilla users have of Mozilla is that it is still slow and still buggy -- something that hasn't been true for many months. This belief is so intrenched that one said if forced to use Netscape, he's sticking with the last version that worked; 4.7.
Last week I gave another friend a couple CDs with OpenOffice and the current Netscape and Mozilla on it. OpenOffice was worth trying, but he refused to give Mozilla a try. Today, on hearing news of the AOL switch to Mozilla, he replied "Well, what are they going to do when web pages don't load?"
While I'm in agreement that a Linux-based AOL-branded computer (not just a browser) could work, there is one real snag.
AOL would make it clear that this wasn't a Windows computer and that Windows software wouldn't run on it, but AOL has enough money to keep at it until they've sold enough units for software vendors to start supporting it.
This won't work. Example: My little sister runs Linux. I setup and configured it for her. She has StarOffice and all the other apps. I put games and game demos on the machine. I've offered to install any type of software she wants.
Overall, she's happy and content with the machine, and has been using it for almost 3 years now.
Her main complaint? She can't open Windows programs in email. She is really upset about this, and mentions it often.
Yes, I've mentioned that this is a Bad Idea. I've mentioned this multiple times. She's still confused that she can't open Windows programs in her email.
Well, I finally installed Wine for her, and gave her directions on how to use Wine to run those attachments. Yes, I gave her another warning. No, she does not listen.
Now, say AOL sells this computer to 10% of thier customers, and only 10% of those want to run those Windows attachments...sure, the net would be a safer place...but calls to AOL would go up substantially.
This is all guesswork on my part, though I'd like to know how well the AOL-branded browser computers went for AOL. So far, the whole internet appliance business seems to have slowed to a crawl.
When you logon to AOL, you fire up AOL's software. That another browser might be on the system is not an issue for an AOL user; they'll never see the other browser, and I doubt that they will notice a new one is being used in AOL 8.0. Instead, they will notice that AOL itself has been upgraded...and probably nothing more specific.
What I'd like to see is more information on converting from Windows to Unix-style systems. Except for Apple joining the Unix camp, the percentage of Windows and Unix systems seems to be fairly static.
Re:there's always a deal to be found...
on
Low-end Laptops?
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· Score: 1
You might also need to run faster than the salespeople too... 'Hi, it seems you're stealing this laptop right now. Would you like a 3-year warrantee on it? It will protect it from all normal wear and tear...'
Change the salesperson into Clippy, and you've just described Hell.
Unix eats it's young...an argument for integration
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Penguin2Apple
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· Score: 2
The compelling thing about unix systems is how similar they are.
OK, OK, hold on...it is true that you can't sit down at any of the *BSDs and bang out a shell script if your only unix experience is a few minutes of clicking around the Mac desktop. Even if you write a shell script that works for Solaris, depending on what files you touch you might have to re-write parts of it for Linux...and possibly re-write other parts as your Linux distribution moves toward LSB compliance.
Where the old commercial Unix vendors failed to deliver on the concept of Open, much of the current stuff is so open it's forcing the remaining propriatory Unix and Windows vendors to react. Every major OS has Posix support included or easily available. More graphics and widget sets are portable to nearly every OS. Virtual machines and other runtimes are abundant.
Yet, unix is Unix. Even if not by name. Even with the distribution snobbery, cliques, and infighting. Code is largely portable from unix to unix and machine to machine. Recursive acronyms aside, and no matter what your feelings are about the FSF, the GNU toolset is generally accepted Unix and acts as the core of the translation system.
IBM is mostly right when they claim 'Linux is lingua franca of the enterprise'. It's not just Linux, but any unix. Standardizing on Linux can be benificial, but Linux is still Unix...and in general Unix works so well, it's not impossible to switch to...another unix.
With that, I propose that if you want more Unix users -- for your flavor of unix or not -- make Windows as Unix-like as possible. They have the monster sized chunk of the market, and if one Unix system ends up replacing another, we may as well include Windows in that group.
Here's the meaning of treble dammages to Microsoft.
According to Microsoft's latest filings, they have about $38,229,000 USD in either cash or short term investments. Corrections appreciated, but to me that sounds like moderately liquid assets.
Let's say we forget about those additional assets awhile, and focus only on new profits. For the last four quarters ending in December 2001, they announced a total of $26.91 billion. This amount of profit is above the previous year by a minimum of 10% in each quarter.
So, let's say that Microsoft looses two major cases -- Netscape (AOL/TW) and Sun -- and that the courts have no patience or mercy and award $2 billion each for a total of $12 billion. Let's also say Microsoft makes no effort to fight the settlement, and they fork up the $12 billion in installment payments over a span of 12 months.
At the same rate as last year, keeping it at a modest 10% growth rate, MS's profit would have grown to around $29.60 billion or a little over $81 million a day.
That means that at Microsoft's current rate, they would hand over the profit from the first 148 days of 2002 -- ending just before June kicks in.
No doubt, that's a lot of ifs. Chances are any settlement will happen years from now, and will be much more modest. Also, this does not touch the short term investments and liquid assets -- only the new profits and only using the fictional example up till June.
And it seems they did mushrooms [totse.com] to go beserk. Cool guys.
Well, I like Norg and Norwegians in general. Smart, good looking, and easy to talk and get along with.
Having said that, it's a Very Good Thing that they have high taxes on boose. Whenever they visit the US or take a cruise into international waters, the first thing they do is drink like fish, close the bars down, and get very Viking-like.
Details: Written in Python (for easy application creation) and C (for speed), GNUe is under constant and heavy development. If you want to write custom applications for it, it's ready. Pre-packaged applications are on the back burner as the development team works on making the core modules more complete and compliant with varying standards. My personal estimate from following the project is that the first complete applications will show up in about 6 months, and then rapidly accelerate as more app developers learn about GNUe and get interested.
Have you tried Wine in the last two weeks? They've made huge changes, so Bloomberg might work. As for MS Office, the main gotcha is getting it to install under Windows then moving it over to a partition that an OS (Linux or other) can read.
Details on what to do for specific MS Office versions are at appdb.codeweavers.com.
Anti-trust laws do have teeth -- companies have been broken up due to them.
Microsoft has teeth too, and so far the US Department Of Justice has not pushed as hard for a breakup when they should have. Result; ~10 years of dancing around what should be an obvious conclusion; splitting MS up.
We can hope. The only good sign is that the judge seems to have recognized that this is not a simple matter and is taking the review seriously.
I'd do a little dance if she came back with substantial changes that reflect even half of the obvious objections aired in either SBC or AOL/TW's comments. I'm not betting on it, though.
I ment: I want a different VFS, a different VM etc. You can't change that overnight. That takes serious effort and testing to see if all applications work with the new element in the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Gates: "Well..." [Bill, staring at the floor, kicks a tile with the tip of his shoe. He glances at Balmer.]
Judge: "Billll???" [Peering down to catch youthful William's eye.] "Come one now, you can do it. Steven's already promised."
Gates: "OK, I -- I promise."
Judge: "See, that wasn't so bad. Was it?" [Most in the court room look around, shaken by the emotion, almost to the point of crying. Some indeed do wipe back tears as they nod in approval.]
Doj: "Oh, darn it! Everybody, group hug!" [And a cheer goes up as Justice has once agin been served. Golly, it sure as heck has.]
OS/2's Windows support was hokey. By the time Windows programs were really taking off, they were for Win32s (Win95-style, not Win3x). Those programs worked poorly at best under OS/2 if they worked at all. Good Win32s support was always promised just around the corner, and it never came.
Many of those same programs now work -- and install -- under Wine with much better sucess.
And plus it doesn't work very reliably for the software (well, Word, IE and Outlook) that most people want to use, and it seems like the developers are more interested in using the code for proprietary emulation for running specific programs (games, plugins) or porting (corel stuff, etc.) than producing a general, Free, universal windows emulator.
Wine is not emulation. Here's what the FAQ-o-Matic says;
[Wine] calls native libraries...not an emulated environment.
As for your other points, no current versions of Word, IE, or Outlook work under OS/2, yet old versions do work under Wine and current versions should be there shortly; remember Lindows MS Office support is based on Wine. Track the progress on the Wine mailing lists and on appdb.codeweavers.com. Some non-Lindows Wine screen shots are available here; wine.godmonkey.com.
If you ever had a CompTIA certification, they said this promoting the idea that they speak for you . Angry? Me too. Now, what to do about it? Hmmmm...
While SuperRescue is fantastic, it does not elimiate boot diskettes becuase quite a few machines can't boot a CD (disabled), and when the CD drive breaks, you've got to have a fall back.
Yes, I know the whole floating point issue; the referece Ogg Vorbis decoder requires FP, and portables don't have FP hardware.
Govmnt guy: "We need to have a private copy of your software. Can we buy it?"
Me: "Hmmm...OK." (Govmnt gives money, Me gives Govmnt new licence.)
Me: "Do I have to claim this on my taxes?
Govmnt guy: "Yessss."
Me: "By the way, what are you going to do with your new software, anyway?"
Govmnt guy: "It's classified."
Me: "Oh, really?" (Govmnt guy hands over more money.)
Doesn't seem like a problem to me!
If the second and third tier shipments just had a switch (or a bit) flipped to disable a feature, that's a problem -- source or no source.
A new post points out that the systems had 256MB, so recovery of 10MB should make a substantial difference.
Any change in available memory can have a drastic effect. The sum total of the changes should add up to a minimum of 10M on an untuned system (One example: Bonobo on Gnome uses ~3.5MB by itself, while a few Gnome terms with a large history buffer chew up an additonal 10MB -- not all of it shared. Just switching from a heavy weight WM to a light weight one and smaller helper apps would recover the bulk of this space. Other changes would only add to the savings).
That minimum of 10MB might be just enough to cut disk swapping down -- by how much it really depends on the application. If it's a single block of data, and no calculations are being done, no speed improvement will be noticed. If it's an in-memory array, the savings could be substantial.
Without giving it a try, or knowing the application's demands, nobody can say for certian.
With that as a given, if your app needs all available memory, run top and lsmod to see what's using your memory and remove everything you don't need (usually by deleting the links to those processes in the /etc/???/rc5.d directory).
If you can't remove it, scale it down. For example /etc/inittab lists off the different virtual terminals that appear when you press ctrl-alt and a function key. If you never use this feature, try reducing this down to 1 or 2 terminals. Leave some behind just in case you need them later. To do this, just comment the higher numbered lines that look like this;
6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6
(NOTE: Removing these lines might not make any difference -- it all depends on the distribution.)
As for X (assuming you need it and are using XFree), try removing any Load lines in the modules section that you don't need and scaling down the display size, background images, and color depth. Another big area of savings is changing the window manager. FVWM usually is installed, and while it is ugly it is also fairly light weight when compaired to KDE, Gnome, and other popular full-featured WMS.
While these steps alone won't eliminate the speed problems -- the other comments might solve that -- the time you spend waiting might be cut way down.
Unix-systems are similar enough that a switch from one to another is usually practical. Everything else is preference or application specific.
I agree that mind share is a big deal, and often trumps technical capability. The Hurd, though, is an interesting beast. It has some potential applications where Linux isn't as useful (currently). Like the BSD Jail, Linux will either add those capabilities or will not be as useful. Unlike Jail, some of the capabilities of Hurd come from the design of Hurd, so mimicing them under Linux will likely be awkward or impractical.
Either way, it should spur more evolution in modern Unix-style systems, so it's worth it for that reason alone.
Last week I gave another friend a couple CDs with OpenOffice and the current Netscape and Mozilla on it. OpenOffice was worth trying, but he refused to give Mozilla a try. Today, on hearing news of the AOL switch to Mozilla, he replied "Well, what are they going to do when web pages don't load?"
Folks, I'm speachless.
This won't work. Example: My little sister runs Linux. I setup and configured it for her. She has StarOffice and all the other apps. I put games and game demos on the machine. I've offered to install any type of software she wants.
Overall, she's happy and content with the machine, and has been using it for almost 3 years now.
Her main complaint? She can't open Windows programs in email. She is really upset about this, and mentions it often.
Yes, I've mentioned that this is a Bad Idea. I've mentioned this multiple times. She's still confused that she can't open Windows programs in her email.
Well, I finally installed Wine for her, and gave her directions on how to use Wine to run those attachments. Yes, I gave her another warning. No, she does not listen.
Now, say AOL sells this computer to 10% of thier customers, and only 10% of those want to run those Windows attachments...sure, the net would be a safer place...but calls to AOL would go up substantially.
This is all guesswork on my part, though I'd like to know how well the AOL-branded browser computers went for AOL. So far, the whole internet appliance business seems to have slowed to a crawl.
When you logon to AOL, you fire up AOL's software. That another browser might be on the system is not an issue for an AOL user; they'll never see the other browser, and I doubt that they will notice a new one is being used in AOL 8.0. Instead, they will notice that AOL itself has been upgraded...and probably nothing more specific.
What I'd like to see is more information on converting from Windows to Unix-style systems. Except for Apple joining the Unix camp, the percentage of Windows and Unix systems seems to be fairly static.
Change the salesperson into Clippy, and you've just described Hell.
OK, OK, hold on...it is true that you can't sit down at any of the *BSDs and bang out a shell script if your only unix experience is a few minutes of clicking around the Mac desktop. Even if you write a shell script that works for Solaris, depending on what files you touch you might have to re-write parts of it for Linux...and possibly re-write other parts as your Linux distribution moves toward LSB compliance.
Where the old commercial Unix vendors failed to deliver on the concept of Open, much of the current stuff is so open it's forcing the remaining propriatory Unix and Windows vendors to react. Every major OS has Posix support included or easily available. More graphics and widget sets are portable to nearly every OS. Virtual machines and other runtimes are abundant.
Yet, unix is Unix. Even if not by name. Even with the distribution snobbery, cliques, and infighting. Code is largely portable from unix to unix and machine to machine. Recursive acronyms aside, and no matter what your feelings are about the FSF, the GNU toolset is generally accepted Unix and acts as the core of the translation system.
IBM is mostly right when they claim 'Linux is lingua franca of the enterprise'. It's not just Linux, but any unix. Standardizing on Linux can be benificial, but Linux is still Unix...and in general Unix works so well, it's not impossible to switch to...another unix.
With that, I propose that if you want more Unix users -- for your flavor of unix or not -- make Windows as Unix-like as possible. They have the monster sized chunk of the market, and if one Unix system ends up replacing another, we may as well include Windows in that group.
According to Microsoft's latest filings, they have about $38,229,000 USD in either cash or short term investments. Corrections appreciated, but to me that sounds like moderately liquid assets.
Let's say we forget about those additional assets awhile, and focus only on new profits. For the last four quarters ending in December 2001, they announced a total of $26.91 billion. This amount of profit is above the previous year by a minimum of 10% in each quarter.
So, let's say that Microsoft looses two major cases -- Netscape (AOL/TW) and Sun -- and that the courts have no patience or mercy and award $2 billion each for a total of $12 billion. Let's also say Microsoft makes no effort to fight the settlement, and they fork up the $12 billion in installment payments over a span of 12 months.
At the same rate as last year, keeping it at a modest 10% growth rate, MS's profit would have grown to around $29.60 billion or a little over $81 million a day.
That means that at Microsoft's current rate, they would hand over the profit from the first 148 days of 2002 -- ending just before June kicks in.
No doubt, that's a lot of ifs. Chances are any settlement will happen years from now, and will be much more modest. Also, this does not touch the short term investments and liquid assets -- only the new profits and only using the fictional example up till June.
Corrections, additional calculations welcome.
Well, I like Norg and Norwegians in general. Smart, good looking, and easy to talk and get along with.
Having said that, it's a Very Good Thing that they have high taxes on boose. Whenever they visit the US or take a cruise into international waters, the first thing they do is drink like fish, close the bars down, and get very Viking-like.
GNU Enteprise
Here's an overview; "GNU Enterprise (GNUe) is a suite of tools and applications for solving the needs of the enterprise. From human resources, accounting, customer relationship management and project management to supply chain or e-commerce, GNUe can handle the needs of any business, large or small. If you are looking for a full-function ERP, GNUe is the package for you.
Details: Written in Python (for easy application creation) and C (for speed), GNUe is under constant and heavy development. If you want to write custom applications for it, it's ready. Pre-packaged applications are on the back burner as the development team works on making the core modules more complete and compliant with varying standards. My personal estimate from following the project is that the first complete applications will show up in about 6 months, and then rapidly accelerate as more app developers learn about GNUe and get interested.
Details on what to do for specific MS Office versions are at appdb.codeweavers.com.
Microsoft has teeth too, and so far the US Department Of Justice has not pushed as hard for a breakup when they should have. Result; ~10 years of dancing around what should be an obvious conclusion; splitting MS up.
Laws mean nothing if they are not enforced.
I'd do a little dance if she came back with substantial changes that reflect even half of the obvious objections aired in either SBC or AOL/TW's comments. I'm not betting on it, though.
Those aren't comprable to a bundled browser.
Good point.